This is a notebook of projects I attempt with a Raspberry Pi or wearable technology

About me

In the photo I am in the blue blouse. It's taken on the famous little railway to Shimla. I'm a Code Club volunteer and love messing about with computing and particularly coding in Scratch. I want to get into 'maker' stuff using my Raspberry Pi but I'm a complete newbie. I am learning a bit about electronic making by going to Leeds Raspberry Jam once a month. I'm looking to do a robot project with the Raspberry Pi Zero in the future. I've just started an adventure to code wearable LEDs using an Adafruit Gemma. And I've been lucky to have been given a CodeBug so I'm learning to use that too!

Christmas goodies from Pimoroni

Received some great kit for Christmas from Pimoroni. A camera which I haven’t looked at yet and the ‘Adventures in Raspberry Pi’ kit. After downloading Carrie Anne Philbin’s ‘Adventures in Raspberry Pi’ book to my e-reader, I’ve managed to make a little progress with understanding GPIO (General Purpose Input Output). The 2 x 13 = 26 GPIO pins are the ones in the top left-hand corner of the photo. First, in order to get the correct key (called a Raspberry Leaf Diagram) for the GPIO pins you need to find out which revision of the R Pi Model B you have. I used Chapter 8 from the book and the instructions for the LXTerminal* to identify which revision of the R Pi Model B I had.

Open LXTerminal. (The instructions get you to open the Python shell. As you do this, you become a root or super user which means you aren’t a normal user anymore so be aware of that.) Then just type in the instructions, given in the book, carefully, pressing Enter after each line and it returns a number value which in my case was 2 so my R Pi is Rev 2.

Important – Don’t actually know how important this is but hadn’t turned the page of Miss Philbin’s book where it states:

To close the Python Shell, type:

quit()

Well, I didn’t do that so I’d better get on my R Pi and see if it has done it automatically when I ‘Shutdown’ or if I still need to do it.

*LXTerminal - Use the icon on the Raspberry Pi GUI desktop to go into LXTerminal.